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Is there any way by which individuals with normal color vision could "see" the effects of Deuteranopia or any of the common colorblindness types, say by using special lenses or anything?

Color vision deficits can be approximated via filters on images or video, but is there any way, via special lenses/eyeware or lighting that normal color vision participants could be made to actually perceive a scene as if they had a color vision deficiency from a normal colored object or representation?

3 Answers
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One possibility would be to apply those image filters to a live video stream.

Aside from that, you could consider infrared goggles. Not an exact simulation of colorblindness, but it does apparently make red and green into the same color. And if anything, it would let people see the world in differently.

One online tool that is easy to use is Vischeck (http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/) which, in addition to transforming pictures, also can transform whole web pages so that they appear to you as if you were color blind. While it is not experiencing the "world" as if you were color blind, it at least transforms part of the "reality" people navigate in.

They only have Dichromatic glasses as that's the most common form of colorblindness. As apparent from the articles mentioning them, they're used more for accessible design than research and have clearly been designed from a "practical" standpoint, only covering the most common form of colorlbindness almost certainly for financial/marketing reasons.

I can't find any incidence of these being used in scientific research however. They sound like they have potential but the Marketing:Science ratio is very high so I remain critical.

If anyone knows more about these please let me know/add a separate answer. These sound very promising but I'm seeing a lot of marketing and news and very little science, which is not encouraging.
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Ben BrockaMay 29 '12 at 15:10